Telephone communications systems for specialized institutions are well known in the art. In particular, the special circumstances of an institution population, such as prison inmates, render traditional telephone systems ineffective or useless. Traditional billing systems cannot be used in such environments for a number of reasons. Inmates are often indigent and are always subject to severe restraints and conditions for placing calls and typically are not allowed to receive incoming calls except under very rare and special conditions. Furthermore, telephone privileges are useful as a correctional tool. The institutional administrators grant or revoke privileges to encourage desired behavior amongst the inmates. Special problems are posed when inmates communicate in a language foreign to the institutional workers, making it increasingly difficult to monitor content, often requiring hiring workers with specialized language skills to perform monitoring messages, an expensive undertaking that is more often than not limited by financial constraints of the institution.
Telephone communications suffers from these limitations and further requires significant resources to monitor the content of the calls and also generally requires additional labor to transport and monitor inmates to an appropriate telephone bank.
With the advent of the internet, electronic messaging (e-mail) has become a very useful interpersonal communication technique and is a very desirable substitute for telephonic communications in many circumstances. However, members in many controlled institutions do not have general purpose internet access. However, electronic messaging, when properly managed and administered, can serves as either an alternative or replacement for telephonic communications between the institutional population and their outside friends and family members. A particularly attractive feature of electronic messaging as it relates to institutional use is that the caller/sender and the receiver/recipient do not have to meet at the same chronological time. Thus institutions can schedule time for message transmission or receipt at times convenient to the institution without regard to the availability of outside parties.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,668,045 (the '045 patent) describes a first generation technology that teaches a system for using electronic messaging in an institution. Unfortunately, the '045 patent suffers from many of the same limitations as it telephonic counterpart. Each communication still needs to be monitored, and only institutions that affirmatively adopt the technology can participate, thus severely limiting the application of the technology. Furthermore, when traditional client server email systems are used utilizing popular e-mail protocols such as SMTP and POP3, there is not a persistent electronic connection between the sender and receiver, and it much more difficult to identify the actual recipient of an outgoing message or the actual sender of an incoming messages. The lack of ability to securely and accurately authenticate the parties of an electronic communications poses unacceptable security risks in a prison setting. What is needed is an institutional-friendly electronic messaging system that overcomes the limitations of existing systems.